Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said at the end of last week his country needs to “wean itself from US dependence” in such key areas as security, food and energy.

France’s National Assembly also issued a big report that called Europe a US “vassal” and proposed, in detail, a plan for breaking the US dependence with a pivot to China.

Tokyo and France have just been hit with new tariffs by the Trump administration of 25% and 30% respectively as US President Donald Trump abandons the decades-old free trade philosophy for his new transactional multipolar world model, which economist have described a new economic paradigm.

"If they think Japan ought to follow what America says as we depend heavily on them, then we need to work to become more self-sufficient in security, energy and food, and less dependent on America," Ishiba told local media.

Trump notified Ishiba on Monday, July 7, that Washington would impose tariffs of 25% on Japanese imports from August 1, but hinted at opportunities for additional negotiations.

Brussels has also been wrong-footed by Trump, as it was holding out for the minimum 10% duties coupled with multiple exemptions for some of its most important industries. Instead it has been hit with some of the heaviest taxes on the list of 26 countries.

French politicians are fed up with US bullying – the US is also demanding zero duties on its exports to its various trade “partners” – and have hit back with a call to break ties with the US and turn to China instead.

“This might be the most remarkable geopolitical document I've seen come out of a major European institution so far this century,” says political commentator Arnaud Bertrand. “In the latest sign that at least some consciences are starting to wake up in Europe, France’s National Assembly has produced a remarkable 153-page report that fundamentally challenges the European Union's current US-led confrontational approach towards China and calls for nothing less than a complete strategic realignment.”

The document, filed by the Assembly’s Commission on European Affairs, represents perhaps the most comprehensive institutional critique yet of Brussels' strategy of treating Beijing as a "systemic rival." In the report's words, the US relationship has been a catastrophic failure that has led to the EU seeing "its influence diminish and its interests poorly protected."

The French report details 50 recommendations from the "creation of a common world currency" to dedollarising the global economy, to "replacing the EU's strategy in the Indo-Pacific region with a cooperative approach including China."

“In general, the report's central recommendation is that Europe break free from Atlantic subordination and instead achieve strategic autonomy by partnering with China,” says Bertrand. “This would mark a complete historical reversal – for the first time since the colonial era, the historical West choosing equal strategic partnership with a Global South nation as an alternative to Western alliance structures.”